Jan

4

Ten Things That Won’t Happen In 2010

Filed Under B2B, Blog, eBook, Education, Industry Analysis, internet, news media, online advertising, Publishing, STM | 5 Comments

Are you now as fed up with information industry predictions as I am?  Down here at the bottom of the garden we see things inside out and upside down, so here are 10 things you can confidently ignore in 2010:

  1. All forecasts of a return of advertising levels, regardless of media or format, to “normal”, “pre-recession levels” or equivalent values.  It is not going to happen.
  2. All pronouncements, political or commercial, that suggest that a law, technology or even divine intervention will solve the crisis of intellectual property management or control in the network.  We are in Eden and have eaten the Apple.  Live with it.
  3. Any press release that suggests that eBook, its standards or the technology of access is a finished process ready to be slotted into normal life on Earth.  It takes five steps to download to my Sony eReader – this is an abnormal process and only afficionados would begin to attempt it.
  4. Any pronouncement, even from Mr Murdoch himself, that says that paywalls work OK, people love them and are more than happy to contribute to the funds of hard-pressed News Corp.  Water still flows around a dam, given half a chance.
  5. Anyone who says that the advocates of Open Access in science publishing are winning, losing or changing anything with this argument.  The real issue is defining the future of scholarly communication in the network, and seeing where the commercial entrepreneurial input is needed.  Those who get detained in false arguments with fakirs and fake prophets will be engulfed and lost in the morass of inter-academic argument.
  6. All those who proclaim the eTextbook and say that a format switch will ensure that educational publishers will  live happily ever after.  Education is the Frontline, and is now changing rapidly.  2010 will be the year of critical transformation in many parts of the world except where state control is absolute (e.g. France) or the system is too poor to cope (the UK).
  7. All claims that commoditisation of content will  ease because some content players have re-enacted the parable of King Canute (or Cnut, or Knut – when you have Danish kings you have to live with constant variation).  Google, at a stroke, is now a provider of primary law globally.  If law publishers have any idea of where the value chain is they need to be climbing it to safety with the speed of Canute’s courtiers saving him from the incoming tide.
  8. Any continuing claims that you can move the brand of a trade magazine to the network without fundamentally altering its role or its customer relationships, and that brand values will enable it to survive.  The network is a service zone, not a product promotion space.  We have spent a decade learning this and surely we do not have to go through it all again in 2010?
  9. Anyone who says that customer-created content does not work.  Now that our financial services operators fully recognize their role as value re-cyclers and aggregators, there is no excuse for the rest of the class.
  10. Anyone who proclaims the arrival of a new age and names it web 3.0 , 4.2 or X marks the spot.  We are working within a new continuum, every technology we will use in the next 15 years has already been invented and patented, and what remains to be seen is only the way in which consumers react to which combinations of hardware/software/content to solve which problems in what contexts. And nothing is lost by experimentation.

If we are all unfazed by the the tendency of the market to create smoke and erect mirrors, then we can get on with the real game.  As in every year from 2000 to 2010, clever and knowing players, whatever they call themselves, will make real money in information markets.  I hope you are one.  Happy New Year from the bottom of the Garden!

Dec

16

Yet to be Invented

Filed Under Blog, eBook, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

I remember the meeting so well.  I had gone up to Edinburgh to talk to the contracts manager, a courteous but dour Scot who had served Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd loyally after joining the company from school.  I was not only an employee, and a very junior one, but I was also an author (and a fairly poor one).  In both roles I wanted guidance on the new form of the author’s contract.  For example, what did ” publication in whole or in part in any format currently available or yet to be invented” mean?  What it says, said the Guardian of the Legal Rites: we act for you in any future context and all rights which will ever be available will be administered by us.  And will be pretty worthless too, his tone seemed to convey, and I thought little more of it until years later an author/lawyer friend remarked that publishers really should remove the unenforceable from their contracts and simplify them to express only the deal that could be made in the here and now.  For example, he said, all that stuff about claiming to manage distribution and rights in yet to be invented forms – it will never stand up in court.

All of which comes to mind as Mr Stephen  Covey seeks to transfer his eBook rights from Simon and Schuster to Amazon, and Random House announces that its contracts are just like those Nelson antiques of the early 1960s, in that they do cover any technology, including everything not invented at the point of signature and everything still not invented now.  Press reports that the Brits are a bit less confident that the RH USA argument will work are common on this side of the Atlantic, while in the US itself it seems clear that the Random House position of rights omnipotence will not survive a vigorous challenge , and maybe Covey himself has done enough to breach the convention.

So what is this fuss about?  And why try to bend the law into shape to defend the declining powers of publishers?  And those powers are in decline, or they would not need defending in this way.  If Random House and Simon and Schuster created the whizziest and most innovative eBook value add environments, and marketed them with an imagination and panache that compelled distributors to stock them, such that authors told their agents they would take 0.5% less just to be published in that way, then this brouhaha would never have taken place.  Truth to tell, these dogs in this manger are the very people who have resisted the onset of the digital world for half a generation, and are now feeling imperilled and are striking out to defend their traditional position.  But they do not grasp the basic concept of a digitally networked world: to succeed, you must understand users intimately, and design levels of value and enjoyment into your services which take them well beyond the simple reproduction of text in a different format.  If you cannot do that then do not bother to compete – just make way for those who can.

Mr Covey thinks that Amazon can, and will, do a better job than Simon and Schuster.  He may be wrong: this might just be a big distributor play and not result in a better service.  But it is surely his call.  I worked with a man once who was going to put all the world’s knowledge onto a block of silicon no larger than a lump of sugar.  He failed, but the thing that kept us awake at night was certainly not the spectre of Random House showing up to claim the rights to their author content in this context.

What is it about the attitudes of consumer publishing senior management which, despite the best efforts of their own often excellent but under-resourced  digital publishers, feels so much like the French aristocracy in 1789?

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